Sg:

I must agree that the state of steelhead would seem to put a gaping hole in my reasoning that chronic overharvest is the ultimate limiter. I'd like to be able to argue that Puget Sound, with the most compromised habitat in the state, is an exceptional case, but sadly, other steelhead populations seem to be doing very little better. Indeed, the wild steelhead numbers we see today may be very nearly as good as their environment will allow. I do wonder if perhaps steelhead, who spend more of their lives in-river than most salmon, are more adversely affected by the relative lack of stream nutrients (which would link them to the limitations facing salmon)... but that's really not much more than a WAG.

The case for salmon, who are subject to significant harvest, is obviously quite different. It may very well be that we're at carrying capacity for the remaining habitat. I question that, however, simply because I figure the tens of thousands of salmon harvested from the ocean every year must be coming from somewhere, and while I'm no fish biologist, I understand that somewhere to be the same rivers we're arguing can't support them. I realize that just because the rivers (with hatchery supplementation) produced those salmon doesn't mean that they can sustain the full adult population returning to spawn (or that if they did all spawn, any more smolts would survive than under the established escapement goals), but I find it frustrating that, as long as we continue to harvest to the status quo, we'll never know what would happen, and we'll never know what the true limitations (or cabilities) of the habitat are. It's all too typical of how humans deal with issues like this. If it comes down to someone's livelihood (or, more accurately, someone's cash cow) or the resource they exploit, it's resource be "dammed." Every time.